William Lane Craig’s silly views on animal pain further debunked

This brand new video exposes in some detail the absurdity of William Lane Craig’s ongoing attempt to defend his silly, unscientific views regarding animal pain (his view is that animals other than higher primates are unaware they have it – which is a great comfort to animal lovers like himself).

This video responds to Craig’s response to the original video exposing the sheer ridiculousness of the argument he used against me in our debate:

He seems to be talking about the metaethical argument at that point in the debate. Maybe I got the wrong format?

In any case, regarding suffering, I guess he might say that he says that all kinds of animals have the capacity to suffer, but not to suffer in the way we would suffer; so, that would be suffering, but allegedly less suffering.

Of course he does. He has now taken to complaining that naturalism cannot explain intentionality, while making videos explaining that only a frontal cortex can explain how an animal is aware of being in pain.

http://angramainyusblog.blogspot.com/ Angra Mainyu

While one could nitpick on a couple of issues, the video does expose some serious errors in Craig’s arguments regarding animal suffering. Nicely done.

In defending his proposal that animal pain might not count as evil, Michael Murray cited a paper by Lau and Rosenthal on higher-order theory of mind. I contacted David Rosenthal for any comments he had on that and he was good enough to give me a quote, which is published here:

“Anybody who insists that pain and its attendant effects are not very bad for the creature even when the pain is not conscious pain seems to me to be looking for an excuse not to bother with what is plainly a significant case of suffering. There is no sound empirical reason nor any or valid theoretical reason to count pain as suffering only if the pain is conscious. This is simply a matter of defining suffering away by stipulation.”